Ivan Bjerre Damgård (born 1956) is a Danish cryptographer and currently a professor at the Department of Computer Science,

Aarhus University Aarhus University (, abbreviated AU) is a public research university. Its main campus is located in Aarhus, Denmark. It is the second largest and second oldest university in Denmark. The university is part of the Coimbra Group, the Guild, and Ut ...

Denmark Denmark is a Nordic countries, Nordic country in Northern Europe. It is the metropole and most populous constituent of the Kingdom of Denmark,, . also known as the Danish Realm, a constitutionally unitary state that includes the Autonomous a ...

. Ivan is the co-founder of Cryptomathic
Partisia
and Sepior. Ivan is a Professor and head of the research group in cryptography at Aarhus University. He is one of the top cited and publishing researchers in cryptography, is a fellow of the IACR (

International Association for Cryptologic Research The International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR) is a non-profit scientific organization that furthers research in cryptology and related fields. The IACR was organized at the initiative of David Chaum at the CRYPTO '82 conference. ...

), and received the 2015 RSA Award for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics.

Academic background

In 1983, he obtained a master's degree in

mathematics Mathematics is a field of study that discovers and organizes methods, Mathematical theory, theories and theorems that are developed and Mathematical proof, proved for the needs of empirical sciences and mathematics itself. There are many ar ...

(with minors in

music Music is the arrangement of sound to create some combination of Musical form, form, harmony, melody, rhythm, or otherwise Musical expression, expressive content. Music is generally agreed to be a cultural universal that is present in all hum ...

and

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, information, and automation. Computer science spans Theoretical computer science, theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, and information theory) to Applied science, ...

) at Aarhus University. He began his PhD studies in 1985 at the same university, and was for a period, a guest researcher at CWI in Amsterdam in 1987. He earned his PhD degree in May, 1988, with the thesis ''Ubetinget beskyttelse i kryptografiske protokoller'' (Unconditional protection in cryptographic protocols) and has been employed at Aarhus University ever since. Damgård became full professor in 2005.

Research

Damgård co-invented the

Merkle–Damgård construction In cryptography, the Merkle–Damgård construction or Merkle–Damgård hash function is a method of building collision-resistant cryptographic hash functions from collision-resistant one-way compression functions. This construction was used in t ...

, which is used in influential

cryptographic hash function A cryptographic hash function (CHF) is a hash algorithm (a map (mathematics), map of an arbitrary binary string to a binary string with a fixed size of n bits) that has special properties desirable for a cryptography, cryptographic application: ...

s such as

SHA-2 SHA-2 (Secure Hash Algorithm 2) is a set of cryptographic hash functions designed by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) and first published in 2001. They are built using the Merkle–Damgård construction, from a one-way compression ...

SHA-1 In cryptography, SHA-1 (Secure Hash Algorithm 1) is a hash function which takes an input and produces a 160-bit (20-byte) hash value known as a message digest – typically rendered as 40 hexadecimal digits. It was designed by the United States ...

and

MD5 The MD5 message-digest algorithm is a widely used hash function producing a 128-bit hash value. MD5 was designed by Ronald Rivest in 1991 to replace an earlier hash function MD4, and was specified in 1992 as Request for Comments, RFC 1321. MD5 ...

. He discovered the structure independently of

Ralph Merkle Ralph C. Merkle (born February 2, 1952) is an American computer scientist and mathematician. He is one of the inventors of public-key cryptography, the inventor of cryptographic hashing, and more recently a researcher and speaker on cryonics. M ...

and published it in 1989. Ivan Damgård is one of the founders of the

Cryptomathic Cryptomathic is a software company specializing in the area of cryptography for e-commerce security systems. The company develops secure software for the financial and governmental industries. It focuses especially on developing back-end solution ...

company. In 2010, he was selected as IACR Fellow. In 2020, he received the Public Key Cryptography (PKC) conference Test of Time Award for the paper "A Generalisation, a Simplification and Some Applications of Paillier's Probabilistic Public-Key System", which was published in PKC 2001 by Damgård and Jurik. In 2021, Damgård received the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) Test of Time Award for the paper "Multiparty unconditionally secure protocols", which was published in STOC 1988 by Chaum, Crépeau, and Damgård.

References

External links

Home page of Ivan Damgård
*

{{DEFAULTSORT:Damgard, Ivan Danish scientists Danish computer scientists Modern cryptographers Living people 1956 births International Association for Cryptologic Research fellows Academic staff of Aarhus University